Lindsey Pollard has worked on some of the most influential animated shows in recent memory, including The Simpsons and Drawn Together. She is currently the supervising animator director (for the third year) on Sanjay and Craig. In this interview, Lindsey talks about her role: matching dialog to storyboards, balancing audio and visuals, and timing and supplementing action. She discusses the different properties she’s worked on over the years, including her first feature film, The Simpsons Movie, and offers advice to new animators who want to get a foothold in the industry.
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Instructor’s Welcome Note:
– My name is Lindsey Pollard and I am the Supervising Animation Director on a show called “Sanjay and Craig,” which is a Nickelodeon production. I’ve been doing that now, this is my third year. This is the third season. We’re wrapping up the third season. We have about 10 shows left on the production. It’s been really fun. It’s kind of a wild ride. I’m the last person to touch the show. Basically, anything that moves is my responsibility and I supervise a team of people.
There’s two timers and then there are two people who are revisionists. What happens is, after the boarding stage, we work from tracks, so we listen, we spend most of our days with headphones on listening to the dialogue. We’re responsible for matching the dialogue to the movement. Of course, we’re looking at the storyboards and the animatic and we’re basically merging the dialogue with the storyboards and just making sure that anything that moves is moving exactly as it should.
We generally have some sort of animation experience. It’s best if we know how to draw. We’re merging the two together just to make sure that it’s seamless. Basically, to make sure that the whole thing comes together and moves as smoothly as possible. It basically goes overseas where it’s animated. One of our Supervising Directors is in fact, an animator, and so one of the shows that was broadcast recently had Snoop Dogg. There were some parts that were fully animated, so our Supervising Director, in fact, animated some of the sequences that are just, they’re beautiful.
So all we did was we made sure that the in-betweens fell where they should, and so the accents hit, so that the animation was perfectly clear. Then overseas, there’s a Korean studio called Saerom. We made sure that they hit exactly, the poses hit exactly where they should according to where the music hit so that it just was a seamless interpretation of what he wanted, but he basically did most of the drawings. Some of the the information that isn’t in the storyboards, for example, if there’s a cat in our show who’s an ornery character, it’s a bad-tempered cat, and so he’s constantly flicking his tail.
If I want things like that to accent a point. The cat doesn’t actually say anything, but if I want the cat to act, to supplement the action to do something on top of what’s in the board, then I’ll animate the cat flicking its tail, or meowing or rolling around, making a nuisance of itself, that sort of thing. I’m allowed to supplement whatever is not in the board. Secondary characters, or I think anything that’s going to add to the action in the board, that’s what my job is, is to just supplement.
Not detract from the action, but to add to it. – Right. – So it’s just a lot of listening to what’s going on in the track and making sure that it supports whatever is going on. It’s like a balance, trying to figure out what’s best going to convey what’s happening. Any action that’s going on that’s surrounding what the main point of the story is, to make sure that that action, again, is supporting what’s going on in that particular scene.
I’ve worked on a lot of other shows. I’ve worked on a lot of Prime Time shows. I started down here in Los Angeles on “The Simpsons,” so that was actually a real, that was great, because of my neighbor, the person that found a place for me to live down here, it happened to be behind somebody who worked on “The Simpsons.” So that was a real stroke of luck. That’s, I think, how Los Angeles works. – Yeah. – You know, and that’s how I’ve stayed employed this whole time is through meeting people and making friends and finding these job opportunities, just through following people where ever they go and onto their projects, you know? So I’ve been really lucky.
So I worked there for a long time and I had a terrific director there, Bob Anderson who I worked very closely with. So I worked there for a long time, and then whenever there was a layoff, I would go and work at other studios, because I’m not
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